


Junkrat And Mei's Bitchin' Snowbomb!

by Nightelfbane



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Bombs, But definitely romantically involved, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Making Out, Mild Sexual Content, Romance, Science, except not really LOVERS, how do i science?, idiots to lovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-28
Updated: 2017-10-28
Packaged: 2019-01-25 11:30:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12530324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nightelfbane/pseuds/Nightelfbane
Summary: Junkrat has An Idea and needs Mei's help.





	Junkrat And Mei's Bitchin' Snowbomb!

**Author's Note:**

> If you spot any spelling or grammatical errors, please point them out so I can fix them.  
> Commenting is encouraged.

Junkrat had An Idea.

It involved explosives, of course.

The team had been in King's Row, fighting next to the Mondatta memorial (why build a big statue for a fuckin' bot?). Junkrat had thrown down a concussive mine so he could get to higher ground. Just as he pressed the detonator and been flung into the air with a hyena-cackle of glee, he heard the resident climatologist shout, "Dòng zhù! Bùxǔ zǒu!"

Her drone, Snowball, flew into the middle of the Talon troopers and begun spinning, unleashing a storm of ice that froze them in place.

He landed with a grunt and immediately begin firing grenades into the frozen crowd. Delightful explosions shattered icy figures as Junkrat's cackles echoed throughout the area.

That had been the last of the Talon troopers in the area. Normally, Junkrat would be giggling again as he revelled in the victory, but this time he just stood there, jittery. Something was bouncing around in his brain, but he couldn't quite nail it down.

He stayed like that the entire flight back to Watchpoint: Gibraltar, bouncing his peg leg and irritating everyone around him until McCree finally snapped at him. After that, he took out his sketchbook and wiled away the rest of the flight sketching.

* * *

Two days later and Mei was still rubbing sleep from her eyes as she walked into her lab. She had been up all night working on the data from Ecopoint: Antarctica. Ten years of data didn't analyze itself, and between missions for Overwatch and her other research projects, she hadn't had much time to study the data or figure out  _why Junkrat was in her lab holding her endothermic blaster?_

 _"Jamison Fawkes! What are you doing with that?!_   _"_

Junkrat, shirtless and sooty as always, jumped a full foot into the air, accidently pulling the trigger on Mei's blaster. An icicle the size of his forearm lanced out from the gun and impaled a wall monitor in a shower of sparks. 

Mei stormed over to the jumpy Junker and snatched her blaster from his hands. "How dare you, trying to steal my blaster! This isn't a toy, you could have hurt yourself! What were you even thinking?!" She switched to Chinese as she continued her rant.

Junkrat held up his hands to stall her. "Oi, oi! I wasn't tryin' to steal it, I was just lookin'!"

Mei placed her blaster back on her workstation and crossed her arms. "Really."

"Honest! I would have given it back, good as new! Mostly..." He gave her a nervous grin. "Hey, maybe you could help!"

Her anger warily started giving way to curiosity. "Help with what?" She said cautiously.

"Snowbomb!" He said cheerily. "Come with me!" He grabbed her hand, ignoring her protests as he dragged her along to the workshop he shared with Torbjörn.

She was surprised at how warm his prosthetic hand was. She always figured it would be chilled.

"Junkrat, seriously, let me go-ooohh..." Mei's voice trailed off as Junkrat dragged her into the workshop. "How can you work like this?!"

The place was a disaster. To the right, against the wall, were Torbjörn's and Junkrat's workstations, where they assembled their gear. To the left was the forge and other machines to help manufacture what they might need. In between it all were piles of scrap and junk. Containers of chemicals lined the shelves above their workstation, which were as messy as the rest of the room. Soot, dirt, and grease was smeared on almost every surface. 

"Whaddya mean?"

"This room is a nightmare! There is trash everywhere!"

"It's not trash! It's scrap! We're recyclin'! Good for the environment, yeah?" Junkrat grinned.

"I guess...but you should still clean up! This is unsanitary!" 

"Whatever. This way!" He led her over to his workstation where he kept his sketchbook and tools.

"Roight, so remember that last mission in King's Row? You used your little drone to freeze all the Talon cunts so I could blow 'em up! And that gave me this idea!" He shoved his sketchbook into her hands. 

Mei cringed as the soot and grime from the sketchbook rubbed off on her fingers, but she looked at what Junkrat had drawn. On top of the page was scrawled 'JUNKRAT'S BITCHIN' SNOWBOMB!'. Underneath that were surprisingly neat and well-drawn schematics for a variety of different explosive devices.

She grew less worried about the soot from the book as she grew more engrossed in the schematics. She sat down on Junkrat's workstool as she turned the pages.

"It's...not a bad idea. I would never have thought of deploying my cryofluid in this way. But something is missing," Mei said.

"Well, see, I don't know a thing about that ice you make! That's why I broke into your lab." Junkrat realized that was the wrong thing to say as Mei sent a fresh glare his way. "Just a figure of speech, sheila! 'cept for that monitor..."

Mei sighed and turned her attention back to the schematics. 

"None of these would work." Junkrat's face fell. "But I can help. Come back to my lab."

Back in her lab, Mei picked up her endothermic blaster and hefted the tank up for Junkrat to see. 

"My blaster uses a mix of water and chemicals to create a type of exotic ice that shatters after a short time. It draws this mixture through a hose connected to this tank." She nodded to a machine against the back wall of her lab. "I use that to create more cryofluid and refill the tank."

She opened a panel on the machine and gestured inside. Junkrat peered inside and saw a variety of tubes and pipes, connecting a series of containers holding water, and blue and green fluids. 

"The cryofluid is activated by an electric current which is generated inside the tank. After that, it freezes on impact and forms the ice I use in combat." 

Junkrat turned back to her. "None of m'designs can zap the cryostuff like that."

"That's why we have to modify one of them." She picked up his sketchbook and turned it towards him, pointing at one of his designs. "If we can modify this design, we can create a prototype."

They sat down at one of the island workstations in her lab, discussing over how to design their prototype. Mei was surprised at how knowledgeable the man was. She felt ashamed when she realized that just because he was loud and dirty criminal she had assumed he was just an ignorant brute. On the contrary, Junkrat rattled off complex scientific terms and theories without missing a beat, and even had to walk her through his explosive designs. 

Junkrat was very patient and kind when it came to her lack of knowledge in his area of expertise. He seemed to delight in explaining his designs, saying that his "genius is finally recognized!"

Their discussions were interrupted by the complaints from Mei's stomach. Junkrat smiled at her blushing face. "Hungry? It's about time for lunch."

"Already?" She pulled out her phone and looked at the clock. "Oh my gosh! We spent all morning in here!"

Junkrat giggled. "Come on, Snowflake. Let's get you to the cafeteria."

They sat down with their trays of food and dug in. Neither of them noticed the strange looks their teammates gave them as they sat at the same table, instead of on opposite sides of the cafeteria.

"So, Junkrat," Mei said in between bites of food. "Where did you learn chemistry and engineering?"

"I was just a lil' kid, pokin' through the ruins of the Alice. One day, I found a library. Went inside an' found a buncha textbooks." He took a bite of his food.

"You taught yourself?" Mei was impressed.

Junkrat grinned and swallowed. "Yup! Raided all the sciency books I could find and brought 'em back to m'shack in Junkertown. Spent a coupla years readin' an' salvagin'. Learned how to make my own stuff." He laughed. "Course, didn't go smooth all the time. My first real big project didn't exactly go as planned." He waggled his metal fingers at her and bounced his peg leg. 

Mei's shame from earlier intensified. She had never really thought about his childhood and how growing up in an irradiated wasteland might have affected him. "That's terrible!"

Junkrat waved her off. "It's fine. Me mates dragged me back to my shack and I whipped up a pair of nifty prosthetics."

Mei's eyes widened. "You built your own prosthetics?"

"Sure did! With only one arm and one leg, too!"

"But...that requires a lot more than simple engineering expertise! You'd need medical knowledge, advanced surgical techniques..."

"It was nothin'. Just tricky buildin' shit with only m'left arm."

Mei hadn't respected him before, but she surely did now.

* * *

The next day they spent in the workshop, much to Mei's dismay. They had finalized the design of their prototype and Junkrat was rooting around the scrapheaps, looking for the materials needed. 

"Found it!" He crowed triumphantly. His metal arm thrust out from the pile of junk, holding a piece of metal that looked no different from any other. The rest of the junker emerged from the pile. "The last piece!" He tossed it to a smaller scrapheap he had assembled next to the forge, which was running hot and making the workshop unpleasantly warm. Junkrat was his usual shirtless self, but Mei had stripped off her usual winter coat and wore only her tanktop, leggings, and shoes.

She tried to ignore the shine of sweat on his abs and biceps as he moved over to the forge. She told herself her face was only red from the heat.

She tore her eyes away from his chiseled abdomen just in time to see him thrust his hand into the forge.

 _"Jamison!"_  she shrieked. She ran forward and grabbed his tattooed arm and yanked it out of the forge. "What are you doing?!"

He looked at her blankly, still holding the piece of scrap. "What?" He looked at the forge and then at his hand. "Oh, right. M'hand's made of metal, sheila! Forge can't hurt it, long as I don't keep it in there too long."

"Really? It doesn't hurt?"

Jamison shook his head "Nah. Doesn't start to hurt unless it starts meltin' or if somethin' smashes it."

As he turned back to the forge to resume working, he found it hard to focus. Mei's eyes had been wide with worry, her face flushed and sweat dripping down her neck towards her rather impressive cleavage. He had never seen her out of her winter coat, and hadn't known just how shapely she was. He struggled to keep from glancing back at her and embarassing himself.

He finished working the metal, then brought the still-warm pieces of a bomb to his workstation. A cylindrical container of Mei's cryofluid was sitting on it, a clean island in a sea of grime. He began assembling the bomb, rapt as his hands rapidly transformed a pile of scrap into a disc only a little larger than his concussion mines. Mei had poured her cryofluid into a glass ring, which Jamison inserted into the bomb before he clicked the last piece into place.

"There she is!" He cried happily. "Let's go test it!"

Mei ran after him as he ran out the door faster than his peg leg could possibly allow. She caught up with him at the training grounds, where the training robots patrolled. He crouched behind a corner, peeking out at a congregation of training bots.

"Jamison, the bots are live, don't you think we should-"

"Nope!" He was too excited to test his new design -  _their_  new design. Winston had reprimanded him more than once for testing explosives inside the base because he couldn't be bothered to make it to the training range. "Bomb's away!"

He jumped out from around the corner and tossed the mine into the bots' midst, hitting the detonator with a gleeful cackle.

Instead of the glorious explosion of ice he had expected, however, there was an explosion equal to one of the Chinese rockets he had set off during the Lunar New Year. Small ice chips fell to the ground around the bots as they turned towards Jamison 

The bots' guns were nonlethal but they  _hurt_. Jamison yelped as the hard pellets bounced off his skin. He ran towards Mei, shouting, "Ice wall! Ice wall!"

"I don't have my blaster!" She cried. The bots rounded the corner, and began targeting her as well as her companion. "Ow, ow, ow!" She hadn't put on her coat before coming here and those pellets  _stung_. Together, Mei and Jamison ran towards the training exit, yelping in pain as the bots hounded them relentlessly.

McCree was entering the training round for his evening practice when the two barrelled past him, almost knocking him over. He began to shout after them, but then he noticed the bots. With a shout of surprise he dove to the left and drew his peacekeeper. With five well placed shots, all the bots crumpled to the ground.

McCree chuckled. "Amateurs."

* * *

  _"Jamison!" she shrieked. She ran forward and grabbed his tattooed arm, feeling his hard muscles as she yanked it out of the forge. "What are you doing?!"_

_He turned to her, giving her a look so molten and feral and intense it made her gasp aloud. He shook her hands free of his arm and placed his blood and bone hand on the back of her neck, pulling her forward into a primal kiss that was all swirling tongues and wild teeth. She was caught off guard, but eagerly reciprocated after a moment, running her hands over his bare back._

_His metal hand was hot from the forge, but not painfully so. It grasped her breast, making her moan against him as the heat soaked into her chest and spread southward. He followed the heat, intensifying it into a lovely firestorm as his mechanical hand slipped under her waistband-_

Mei jerked awake with a gasp, sweat rolling down her face and her heart pounding in her chest. She still felt the heat from her dream, though it was quickly waning as she kicked the covers off her overheated self. The heat in her core remained however, insistent and distracting.

She had dreamed about  _Jamison_. He was a  _junker_  (reformed)! He was loud (passionate), crude (untamed), and devious (intelligent, tall, strong in character as well as in body.  _Definitely_ in body).

Mei shook her head with a frustrated groan, trying to drive the thoughts of Jamison from her head. That's odd - when did she start thinking of him as Jamison instead of Junkrat?

She glanced at the clock and groaned again. It was only 3 a.m. and she was never going to be able to get back to sleep feeling like this.

 _I need a shower_ , she thought.  _A_ _cold shower._

* * *

The explosive part of the device had worked perfectly. Unfortunately, Mei's cryofluid had not activated as intended. Instead of freezing and expanding, trapping the bots in a huge block of ice, it had frozen into a myriad of tiny flakes that floated harmlessly to the ground.

Back to the drawing board, this time in Mei's lab.

Snowball hovered high in the corner of the room, glaring at Jamison with emoticon eyes. Jamison took no notice, however. He was looking over Mei's shoulder at her computer terminal where the formula for her cryofluid was being displayed. 

He considered himself to be an expert in chemistry, but this cryofluid stuff was beyond him. He was more experienced in blowing shit up than he was in freezing it. 

Mei mumbled to herself in Chinese as she typed. She was growing increasingly frustrated as her computer simulations kept coming back negative. The day had not started well. The cold shower had worked, but not in the way she would have wanted. She no longer thought about Jamison. Instead, her sleep deprived mind was caught in a cryostasis chamber in Antarctica. Freezing floors hurting her feet as she stepped out of the cryostasis chamber. The myriad of news articles chronicling the exposure of Blackwatch and subsequent fall of Overwatch. Captain Opara's frozen, skeletal face as she rubbed away the frost-

"Tā mā de!" She cried as she shoved away the keyboard. She covered her face with her hands as she tried to force the awful memories away.

"Hey, Snowflake! It ain't no big deal, I get mixed up all the time, yeah! There're days when I can't even throw together a firecracker, honest! Nothin' to be ashamed of..." Jamison had jumped up when she had shouted, reaching out to comfort her then pulling back at the last second, as if he was afraid she would break if he touched her. In the end, he stood behind her, wringing his hands as she cried.

Mei sniffled and wiped her eyes. "It's not that..." She swivelled the chair around to face him. "I'm just...remembering things I don't want to."

Jamison nodded. "Yeah, I know what that's like."

"Y-you do?"

"Yeah." He pulled a chair over and sat down. "Australia was a fuckin' shithole." 

She had forgotten about his background again. "How...how do you deal with it? The memories."

He held up his sketchbook. "I draw. I build bombs and shit. Doesn't work all the time. Like I said - lotsa times where I can't build a firecracker to save m'life." He gazed at the wall, clearly 16,000 kilometers away, in unpleasant memories.

Losing his limbs wasn't as easy as he had let on during their lunch together. The bomb he had made had worked perfectly. It had detonated and brought down the wall it was supposed to, but it had also launched shrapnel in every direction. Fragments of metal had hit his arm and leg, and the wounds became infected. 

Jamison remembered sweaty nights rolling around in his shack, tormented by fever dreams. His fellow junkers stood over him, arguing about something. Then they were holding him down, and one of them was raising a butcher's knife-

Jamison startled as he felt arms wrap around him. Mei had stood up and hugged him? Why the hell-

"Sorry I reminded you of all that."

"...It ain't nothin', sheila." Still, he wrapped his arms around her and returned the hug. 

Both of them finally started to feel some semblance of peace from their nightmares.

* * *

Mei looked at Jamison sternly. She was wearing her coat this time, and had her endothermic blaster. "What are we  _not_  going to do?"

Jamison looked at the ground. His frag launcher was slung across his back. "We are not gonna run into the training bots like blind chickens."

"Good. What  _are_  we going to do?"

He sighed. "We are going to proceed carefully and observe the results of our prototype."

"Good! Let's get started!"

Jamison grinned, hefting their new prototype. "Right!" He began to move, only to pause and give her an odd look.

"What?"

He held out the detonator to her. "Care to do the honors?"

She hesitated. "Ahh...I've never detonated a bomb before..."

"It's easy as blinkin', sheila! Just press the button and boom! Explosions!"

She hesitated again before nodding and taking the detonator. They crept through the practice range once again. This time they made their way to the 2nd level, crouching down on the catwalks as a group of training bots patrolled below.

"Wait until they're all clustered together," Mei said needlessly. Jamison knew how to maximize his bomb's damage.

He waited for the perfect moment, his golden eyes scanning the area below with a predator's gaze. When the five bots' patrols brought them all close together, he threw the mine with an echoing cackle. 

The bomb hit the ground in the middle of the bots, and Mei hit the button with her thumb. With a  _whump_ and a  _crack_ , the bomb exploded, her cryofluid freezing and expanding. In an eyeblink, the five bots had been trapped in a circular block of ice. One of them was half in and half out of the ice, making prerecorded noises of distress. 

Junkrat leapt up from his crouched position and cheered, grabbing her by the shoulders and spinning her around in a whirling dance. She laughed, surprised and exhilarated. She hadn't known how much _fun_ detonating a bomb could - 

Jamison stopped dancing them around the practice range and pressed his warm lips against hers, drawing forth a high-pitched squeak from the climatologist. Mei's thoughts devolved into a whirlwind of impressions and sensations.

The junker pulled back when he felt her stiffen up. Dread roiled in his gut at the thought that he had just made a huge mistake.

 _Shit,_  he thought. Was she going to start screaming and hitting? Laugh in his face? Call Winston, get him fired, left out in the cold for Talon and the bounty hunters? Shit, she was just staring at him and he couldn't make heads or tails of her expression. What was she  _thinking?_

 _He must have showered last night,_  Mei thought as she looked at his surprisingly clean face.

"Uhhh..." Jamison giggled nervously. "You can just, uhh...forget that ever happened. Spur of the moment thing, yeah? Didn't mean nothin' by it! There's no reason to, uhh, say, tell Winston? Right?" He rambled on, desperately trying to fix the situation. 

Mei interrupted the junker by dropping the detonator with a clatter and throwing her arms around his neck. The kiss, while not as wanton as the one in her dream, was passionate, heartfelt, and eagerly returned by the tall man, once he had recovered from the shock. 

Jamison was just about to try slipping her his tongue when the block of ice from their test collapsed like one of Mei's walls, freeing the bots inside. They immediately took aim at the couple and fired.

"Ow! Ow!" They shrieked in pain, their kiss interrupted as they were, once again, pelted by the training bots' pellets. 

* * *

Hanzo Shimada and Ana Amari had planned on getting some target practice. Now they stood slackjawed in the practice range control / observation room, looking down through the windows as a group of training bots harassed Mei and Jamison.

"Did...did you see that?" Hanzo asked, referring to the heated kiss just moments before.

Ana nodded. "I did."

"...Should we turn off the training bots?"

Ana checked the console in front of her and verified that the incident was being recorded. "No." She chuckled.

"...Very well."

**Author's Note:**

> Don't forget to comment!


End file.
